


Apple Red

by Interrobam



Category: Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Genre: Community: disney_kink, F/M, Manipulation, Racism, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 21:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobam/pseuds/Interrobam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterward the Priest left, vowed not to come back, slunk away in his robes. Once they were alone Clopin came from the shadows and the siblings hugged, kissed, laughed like children. He was snared like a fish on a hook. Paris was theirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apple Red

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Rape as a major theme, sexual and emotional child abuse discussed. 
> 
> Written for the Disney Animated Kink Meme.

_“Nothing becomes tempting which is not first forbidden.”_

She knew what he liked.

When he came for her she had carefully smudged her face with dirt, carefully loosened her clothes, carefully painted her lips the shiny red of a ripe apple. She looked as filthy and forbidden as she could possibly be. She fought, she spat, she clawed with stinging nails. When his elderly hands could not wrench her legs open, she pretended he was stronger than he is. She made it all very convenient for him. When he was done (soon, she did so well in her performance, he so poorly in his age) she covered her face and hid her giggling with low, heavy sobs.

Afterward he left, vowed not to come back, slunk away in his robes. Once they were alone Clopin came from the shadows and the siblings hugged, kissed, laughed like children. He was snared like a fish on a hook. Paris was theirs.

She regretted bitterly that her parents were not alive to see this. Her mother, who had trained her in dance and dress, had rouged her cheeks and lined her lips the first time. Her father, who had bitterly resented his lowly status in the city of lights, who had hatched the plan and tried so very hard for a girl, who had told her of the Priest's perversions: the violated Romani girls. From the bloom of her womanhood Esmerelda had known what she was meant to do. When the festival came she knew he would be watching, performed for him and him alone. The guardsmen clearly fancied her: in another life, another world, she would have turned her attention to him. But she had come too far, her parents, her brother, had given up too much. She would do what was needed. She would tempt the Priest, seduce him, show him all of her wit and spit. She would be the one he couldn't forget, the spark that ignited the flame that would burn him to ashes, the original and final sin.

She knew her brother resented that she was the one who to played such a key role. As eldest he felt it should have been his duty to destroy the Priest. But Clopin was kind to her, did not show this in his word or manner. He helped her in her tasks: tidied her paint and massaged her bruises so they would go deep, so they would last, so that the next time the Priest came he would think of their past together. They wanted him to think long term, to think of monogamous victimhood, of mistresses set up in chateaus. 

As the Priest was the head of the city she would be its spine: she would turn the head wherever she liked and make him believe it was his decision. She would play him like tambourine: her people would be much safer under her reign, would be able to move out of the sewers and into the light, would find sanctuary easily. The others, the men and women who spit upon her people, the villagers who passed them in the streets without giving them coin, the nuns that tried and failed to shelter them, the babes who would grow up to do the same, the guardsmen who fancied her, the deformed boy in the bell tower... she would not show them a glint of mercy.

Songs would be sung of their suffering. Songs sung joyously, in Roma, around burning stakes.

When he came a second time it was hard to hide the flicker of pride under her scowl. Yet it was still possible, and she ran and bit and scratched just as before. She made him fight for his prize, she did not spare a look to her brother's face, watching half lit in the corner. She was a wildcat once more, and it excited him terribly, she could feel his tension. She made subtle things different: her barbs were duller, she yielded just the smallest bit faster. The Priest had longed for something like this: the girl who would fall in love with her rapist. The beauty forgiving the beast. He had destroyed so many other girls in pursuit of what Esmerelda planned to give him, like the head of a saint, on a silver platter. She took note of how he cherished her bruises, the longing looks he gave them. He lasted longer, lingered with her on the floor, did not vow to evade her seductive form forever once he left. It was working. 

It would be a long con, a fruited tree now just a seed, a quarter lifetime from bearing its harvest. But it was worth every ache, every sleepless night: the fruit they reaped from it would be sweet as a red apple, sweet as lips colored with blood, sweet as the knowledge of good and evil. She and her brother came up from the sewers that night. They skipped, laughing, through the streets: bells jingling on his clown's suit, semen and blood running down the inner skin of her legs. All the preparation, her purity sacrificed like a lamb on an altar, was irrefutably worth it now. They visited their parent's graves, two shallow ditches on the side of a road, filled in by hand. The siblings, entangled in each other's arms, still laughing like babes at a festival, told them breathlessly of their progress.

Esmerelda liked to think they were smiling down upon her.


End file.
